Talking about capacity using Flipgrid

Capacity. What is it? How can it be measured? How is it usually measured? These are some questions for a maths concept that can develop some much needed language skills. But this is maths, how does one get children talking about maths? FlipGrid to the rescue.

In these lessons about capacity, children learned about containers and different ways of filling them up to find out how much they held. Children then learned how to talk about the comparative sizes of containers and how to measure exact capacities using a measuring cylinder and millilitres.

The capacity and verbal components to this lesson were very successful. The learners enjoyed using water and scientific instruments to find out about capacity. They also enjoyed sharing their learning by talking about it and using a simple video response recording system.

Problems arose with the word problems I had developed for them based on the learning done in the lesson. There were two main problems, both of which could be foreseen with knowledge of my learners. These problems were the inability to comprehend the problem despite being written in a simple and consistent format, and a lack of basic facts knowledge.

In subsequent lessons I structured and walked through how to understand, respond, and answer these problems with some success. I will need to continue scaffolding responses till learners become reasonably proficient before dropping the scaffold.